Valério Arcary

With the election at the end of October 2018 of Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil, the advance of the far right went global. His astonishing victory followed three years of political crisis that saw the last elected president Dilma Rousseff impeached and her predecessor Lula da Silva jailed for corruption, a process that ended the period (2003-16) when the Workers’ Party (PT) governed Brazil.1 The overthrow of the Workers’ Party by an alliance of right-wing parliamentarians and judges produced a massive crisis for the entire Brazilian left. The historian Valério Arcary, a ­revolutionary socialist activist since the 1970s, was one of the leaders of a breakaway from one of the main Trotskyist organisations, the Unified Workers’ Socialist Party (PSTU), provoked by this crisis. He is now a leading member of Resistência, a revolutionary current inside the radical-left Party for Socialism and Freedom (PSOL). This article is an interview with Valério Arcary by Alex Callinicos talking about the meaning of Bolsonaro’s election.

From: International Socialism 2019 issue 161

Editor: Wang Yi